Part 10

_And from no country can the initiative of such an alliance come more effectively than from the United States of America, the universal creditor, who can bring home to France, as no other power can, the beauty and desirability of financial mercifulness._

I submit that these are the broad lines, the elements, the A B C of the present situation and that there is nothing whatever between France and Britain that is not entirely secondary and subordinate to this issue between Insistence and Relief.

And moreover the issue between France in general and Britain in general is an issue that is going on in parallel forms all over the world. Old Japan _insists_ upon the Versailles treaty; young Japan would relieve China,—how much is not yet clear. The American scene is a conflict between those who insist fiercely upon the British debt and those who would devise relieving conditions. It is nowhere a struggle between peoples and races, it is everywhere a struggle between logic and reason, between the stipulated thing, the traditional thing and the humane and helpful thing, between old ways of thinking and new, between the letter and the spirit. Old Shylock was the supreme insister, and since Portia was the triumphant reliever, we may reasonably look to the woman voter and the women’s organizations of Britain and America for a particular impetus towards relief. And the sooner relief comes the better, for once Shylock’s knife has cut down sufficiently to the living flesh, the cause of the reliever and of civilization will have been lost forever.

XXI A REMINDER ABOUT WAR

Washington, December 5.

An examination of the situation that has arisen in Europe between France, England and Germany brings us out to exactly the same conclusion as an examination of the Pacific situation. There is no other alternative than this: Either to fight it out and establish the definite ascendancy of some one power or to form an alliance based on an explicit settlement, an alliance, indeed, sustaining a common executive commission to watch and maintain the observance of that settlement. There is no way out of war but an organized peace. Washington illuminates that point. We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for—a continuation of war. So it is worth considering what that continuation of war will be like. If you will not organize peace through some such association, then organize for war, for certainly war will come again to you, or to your children.

And for reasons set out in my earlier papers, reasons amply confirmed by the experiences of the Washington gathering, a mere limitation of armaments can be little more than a strategic truce. It may indeed even cut out expensive items and so cheapen and facilitate war.

Let me note here in passing that the case for some Association of Nations to discuss and control the common interests of mankind rests on a wider basis than the mere prevention of war; the economic and social divisions and discords of mankind provide, perhaps, in the long run, a stronger and more conclusive argument for human unity than the mere war evil, but in this paper I will narrow the issue down to war, simply, and ask the reader to consider the probable nature of war in the future if the development of warfare is not checked by deliberate human effort.

And I will not deal with the ill-equipped cut-throat war that has been going on, and, thanks to the divisions and rivalries of France and Britain, is likely still to go on in Eastern Europe for some time to come; the wars of the little, self-determined nations that the Treaty of Versailles set loose upon each other; the raids of Poland into Ukrainia, and of Roumania into Hungary; and of Serbia into Albania; the old-fashioned game enlivened by rape and robbery that was brought to its highest perfection long ago in the Thirty Years’ War. These are not so much wars as spasms of energy, phases of accelerated destruction, in the rotting body of East European civilization.

But I mean the sort of war that will come if presently France attacks England, or if America and Japan start in for a good, long, mutually destructive struggle. You may say that war between France and England is unthinkable, but so far from that being the case, certain worthy souls in France have been thinking about it hard. Hard but not intelligently. They do not understand the moral impossibility of Britain fighting America, they have never heard of Canada, they have never examined the text of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and so they dream of a wonderful time when America will be fighting England and Japan, and when France, with magnificent gestures and with submarines and Senegalese at last gloriously justified, will “come to her aid.” So France will divide and rule and clamber to dizzy destinies. Blushing and embarrassed American statesmen have already had to listen, I guess, to some insidious whispers. Even among our distresses there is something amusing in the thought of this hot breath of Old World diplomacy on the fresh American cheek. I do not say that these are the thoughts and acts of France, or of any great section of the French people, but they are certainly the thoughts and proceedings of a noisy Nationalist minority in France which is at present in a position of dangerous ascendancy there.

Still, apart from the fact that the British will always refuse to fight America, there does seem to be no real reason why, in the absence of a developing peace alliance to prevent it, either of the other two matches I have cited should not be played. In the long run, you cannot avoid fighting if you avoid comprehensive alliances and standing arrangements for the settlement of differences with the people you may otherwise fight.

So let us try and imagine a war between a pair of these four powers, five or ten years ahead. They have avoided any entangling alliances, or agreements, or settlements, kept their freedom of action and are thoroughly—_prepared_.

Let us not fall into the trap of supposing that these wars will follow the lines of the Great War of 1914–18 and that we shall have a rapid line-up of great entrenched armies, with massed parks of artillery behind them, tank attacks and all the rest of it. That sort of war is already out of fashion, and the fact that these wars that we are considering will be overseas wars puts any possibility of such a dead lock of land armies out of the case. The combatants will have to set about getting at each other in quite other fashions.

Let us recall the maxim that the object of all fighting is to produce a state of mind in the adversary, a state of mind conducive to a discontinuance of the struggle and to submission and acquiescence to the will of the victor. Old-time wars aimed simply at the small antagonist army and at the antagonist Government, but in these democratic days the will for peace or war has descended among the people and diffused itself among them, and it is the state of mind of the whole enemy population that has become the objective in war. The old idea of an invading army marching on a capital, gives place, therefore, to a new conception of an attack through propaganda, through operations designed to produce acute economic distress, and through the air, upon the enemy population.

I will take the latter branch first. Few people have any clear ideas at present of the possibilities of air warfare. The closing years of the Great War gave the world only a very slight experience of what aerial offensives can be. Always, air operations were subsidiary to the vast surface engagements of the European belligerents; they were scouting, irritating, raiding operations; there were neither the funds nor the energy available to work them out thoroughly. In these possible overseas wars we are considering, the land armies and the big guns will not be the main factors and the air and sea forces will. The powers we have considered will therefore push their air equipment on a quite different scale; they will be bound to deliver their chief blows with it; we may certainly reckon on the biggest long-range airplanes possible, on the largest bombs and the deadliest contents for them. We may certainly reckon that, within three or four hours of a declaration of war between France and England, huge bombs of high explosive, or poison gas, or incendiary stuff, will have got through the always ineffectual barrage and be livening up the streets of Paris and London. Because it is the peculiarity of air warfare that there are no _fronts_ and no effectual parries. You bomb the other fellow almost anywhere, and similarly he bombs you.

Many people seem to think that America and Japan are too far from each other for this sort of thing, but I believe there is nothing insurmountable in these distances for an air offensive. It will be a question of days instead of hours, that is all, before the babies of Tokio or San Francisco get their whiffs of the last thing in gas. The job will be a little more elaborate; it will involve getting the air material to a convenient distance from the desired objective by means of a submersible cruiser; that is all the difference.

All the fleets in the world could hot prevent a properly prepared Japan from pouncing upon some unprotected point of the California or Mexican coast, setting up a temporary air base there, and getting to work over a radius of a thousand miles. She might even keep an air base at sea. And it would be equally easy for America to do likewise to Japan. The citizen of Los Angeles, as he blew to pieces, or coughed up his lungs and choked to death, or was crushed under the falling, burning buildings, could at least console himself by the thought that America was so thoroughly _prepared_ that his fellow man in Tokio was certainly getting it worse, and that he blew to pieces on the soundest American lines unentangled by any alliances with decadent Old World powers. And an air war between America and Japan need not be confined to the Pacific Slope. I do not see anything to prevent Japan, if she wanted to do so, with the aid of a venial neutral or so, getting around into the Atlantic to New York and testing the stability of the great buildings downtown with a few five-ton bombs. The submarine would certainly be able to prevent any armies landing on either side of the Pacific to stop the preparation and launching of such expeditions.

I do not know how American populations would stand repeated bombing. In the late war there was not a single intrusion of air warfare into American home life. The hum of the Gotha and the long crescendo of the barrage as the thing gets near were not in the list of familiar American war sounds. Some of the European populations subjected to that kind of thing got very badly “rattled.” And yet, as I have noted, the whole force of the combatants was not in the air operations in Europe. One result in nearly every country was an outbreak of spy mania; everybody with a foreign name or a foreign look in England, for example, was suspected of “signalling.” There was much mental trouble; London possesses now a considerable number of air raid lunatics and air raid defective children, and these are only the extreme instances of a widespread overstrain. As the war went on, air stress interwoven with the acute stresses produced in public life by the development of propaganda. Public life in France, Germany and England got more and more crazy about propaganda; there was a fear of insidious whispering mischief afoot, more like the fear of witchcraft than anything else; until at last it became dangerous and ineffective to make any utterance at all except the most ferocious threats and accusations against the enemy. And a kind of paralysis of suspicion even affected the adoption of inventions. All this mental and moral confusion and deterioration is bound to happen in any highly organized community that goes into a well prepared war again. The only difference will be that it will all be larger, and intenser, and bitterer, and worse. And I will not even attempt to elaborate the consequences of the economic attack by submarines, upon shipping, and by raids of airplane fleets, assisted possibly by spies and traitors, upon the bridges, factories, depots, grain stores, ports and so forth, of the combatant countries.

If such things are not practicable across the Pacific now they will be practicable in ten years’ time.

But my subject at Washington is peace, and not war. I think it was Nevinson’s recent account of the new things in poison gas that set my imagination wandering into these possibilities of the Great Alternative to entangling treaties and difficult settlements. I will return to certain neglected problems of the Peace Conference in my next article.

XXII SOME STIFLED VOICES

Washington, December 6.

I do not think my outline sketch of the Washington Conference will be complete if I do not give an account of certain figures and groups in this simmering Washington gathering who have no official standing whatever and who are here in the unpopular role of qualifications and complications of the simpler conception of the Washington issues. They are not conspicuous absentees as are Germany and Russia. They come upon the scene but they come rather like that young woman with the baby who stands reproachfully at the church door watching the wedding in the melodramatic picture. They are full of reproaches—and intimations of troubles yet in store.

The other evening, for example, I found myself dining with a comfortably housed Corean delegation and listening to the tale of a nation overwhelmed.

Corea is as much of a nation as—Ireland. She had so recent an independence that she has treaties with the United States recognizing and promising to respect her independence. Yet she is now gripped, held down and treated as Posen was in the days of Prussian possession. She is being “assimilated” by Japan. “What is to be done about us?” my hosts asked.

One fellow guest thought nothing could be done because the Corean vote in the United States is not strong enough to affect an election.

Amid the tumult of voices here one hears ever and again an appeal for something to be done for Corea. Such appeals are addressed chiefly to American public opinion, but it is also felt to be worth while to let Britain know, at least to the extent of letting me in on this occasion. I was introduced to an editor of a Corean paper which had recently been suppressed, and I listened to an account, an amazing account, of the freedom of the press as it is understood in Corea under Japanese rule.

Yet it sounded very familiar to me. Indeed, I had listened to much the same story of suppressions, rather worse suppressions, the night before. Then I had been the host of two friends of mine, Mr. Houssain and Mr. Sapre, who have had extensive experiences of suppression in India. They are both here in much the same spirit as the Coreans.

Whenever I talk to Mr. Houssain we always get to a sort of polite quarrel in which he treats me more and more like the Indian Government in its defense, and I become more and more like the British ascendancy. I adopt, almost inadvertently, as much as is adoptable of the manner and tone of the late Lord Cromer and say: “Yes, yes. But are you _ripe_ for self-government?” These gentlemen say frankly that the British rule in India has displayed so much stupidity in such cases as the Amritsar massacre, and the recent suffocation of the Moplah prisoners, and that its complete suppression of any frank public discussion of Indian affairs in India is so intolerable, that it is becoming unendurable.

Everybody is talking of insurrection in India now; nobody talked of it three years ago. These have been three years of stupid “firmness.” Now that that dinner party is past and gone, I can confess that I think Mr. Houssain’s argument that under British rule India has no chance of getting politically educated, because she is prevented from airing her ideas, and that if her discontent is incoherent and disorderly it is because of the complete suppression, completer now than ever before, of discussion, is a very strong argument indeed.

India and Britain cannot talk together about their common future if India remains gagged and without ever a chance of learning to talk. If a break comes in India it is likely to be a bad and hopeless one, because of her lack of worked-out political conceptions, due to her long mental restraint, while all the rest of the world from Corea to Peru has been trying over political self-expression.

But it is interesting and perhaps not quite so pathetically hopeless as it seems at the first glance to find these two men in this city, side by side with the Coreans, trying to get “something done about it” at the Washington assembly. And a day or so ago I had a call from another unofficial delegate, a Syrian Moslem who wanted to talk over the education of his people, also fretting beneath the wide surfaces of the Treaty of Versailles, with the ambition to manage the affairs of Syria for themselves.

And as another case of the stifled voice here are the representatives of the Cantonese Chinese Government, who made a scene the other day when the Peking representatives went into secret session with the Japanese. There was an assembly of hostile Chinese shouting “Traitor!” and things—apparently very disagreeable things—in Chinese. Here again there is a clamor for attention that gets short drift from the official conference.

And, lest these stifled outcries should fill the American reader with self-righteousness, I will note in passing that the entrance to the second plenary conference was besieged by an array of banners reminding us that that evidently most gentle and worthy man, Mr. Debs, is still in prison for saying his honest thought about conscription, and also that I have received, I suppose, over twenty letters about an unfortunate young Englishman, a minor poet named Mr. Charles Ashleigh, who seems to have come into America looking like a person of advanced views, to have done some publicity work for the I. W. W., and to have been caught in a gale of indiscriminate suppression and given a sentence of ten years for nothing at all. The offense of Mr. Debs and the alleged offense of Mr. Ashleigh, I may note further, were a premature craving for universal peace which might have weakened the will for war.

All these suppressions of opinion strike me as black sins against civilization, which can only maintain itself and grow and flourish through the free expression and discussion of ideas. The temptation to ride off from the main business of the conference upon some Quixotic championship of Corea or India or Mr. Ashleigh is therefore very considerable. But when we consider that all these particular injustices are incidents in that general disorder which permits the aggression of nation upon nation and which blinds justice with cruel passion and urgent necessities of war, these cases appear in a different light.

Corea and the suppressed and imprisoned Indian Liberals and Mr. Ashleigh are like people hit casually in a great combat, and the immediate work of the ordinary combatant is surely not to specialize upon these special cases but to go on with the general fight for world peace which will render the atmosphere that created these particular wrongs impossible. Japan is attempting to crush and assimilate Corea because Japan wants to be bigger and stronger, and she wants to be bigger and stronger because of the fear of war and humiliation. Britain holds down India and is reluctant to loose her hold on Ireland for the same cause; if she relax, some one else may seize and use. America also crushes out the anti-conscriptionist because otherwise he may embarrass the conduct of the next war.

In the present conference the liberal forces of the world may be able to establish a precedent that will at once reflect upon the position of both Corea and India, and to open such a prospect of peace as will make the release of Messrs. Debs and Ashleigh inevitable. But that can only be if we stick to the main business of the conference and do not fuss things up at present with too much focusing upon Corea or India or the case of Mr. Debs.

The precedent that may be established through the conference is the liberation of China, when China is militarily impotent and politically disordered, not only from fresh foreign aggression but from existing foreign domination. The establishment of such a precedent is a thing of supreme importance to all men. If the conference does not get so far as that—so far as to establish the principle that an Asiatic people has a right to control its own destinies and to protection while it adjusts these destinies, in spite of the fact that it cannot as an efficient power defend that right—it will have made a very wide step indeed not only toward world peace but toward a general liberation of Asiatic peoples held in tutelage.

It is so important to mankind that that step should be made that I grudge any diversion of energy to minor injustices, however glaring, or any complication of the issue whatever. So far as the conference goes, I am convinced that “Stick to the freedom of China” is the watchword for all liberal thinkers. By the extent to which China is liberated and secured the conference will have to be judged. Even the vast problem of India cannot overshadow that issue.

XXIII INDIA, THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS

Washington, Dec. 7.

It is difficult to think of any subject more completely out of the agenda of the Washington Conference than the future of India. But none demands our attention more urgently, if we are to build up anything like a working conception of an Association of Nations.

Some days ago Senator Johnson declared he had received assurances from President Harding that no further steps toward a definite organization of an Association of Nations were to be taken for the present; but these assurances will not hinder the drift of thoughts and events toward such a developing system of understandings as must at last, in fact if not in name, constitute a World Association. Indeed, the less we try to fix such a thing at present, and the more we think it out, the more probable and safe is its coming.

Let the President go on, therefore, taking no steps directly toward his Association but proceeding, as he must do very soon, with some sort of international conference upon the economic disorders of the world, and also with the creation of some arrangement, permanent understanding or whatever other name may be given to that commission which is inevitable if the peace of the Pacific is to be made secure. Let us who are dealers in the flimsier preparatory stuff of ideas and public opinion get on with our discussion of the wider stabilizing understanding that looms behind.

I have already said that from every country world peace and universal prosperity will demand a price. The price America will need to pay if she is to impose her conception of a universal peace upon the world is a great intellectual effort—an effort of sympathy, an abandonment of some venerated traditions. And in addition she must nerve herself to what may seem at first very great financial generosities. France must pay by laying aside an ancient and cherished quarrel, her glorious and tragic militarism and the last vestige of her imperial ambition. The thought of predominance and the thought of revenge must be the German sacrifice. And Britain also must pay in an altered attitude to those wide “possessions” of hers inhabited by alien peoples that have hitherto constituted the bulk of her empire.